Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Recently, interest has been shown in use of voice interfaces for computing devices. In particular, voice interfaces are becoming more common for devices often used in “eyes-busy” and/or “hands-busy” environments, such as smart phones or devices associated with vehicles. In many scenarios, devices in eyes-busy and/or hands-busy environments are asked to perform repetitive tasks, such as, but not limited to, searching the Internet, looking up addresses, and purchasing goods or services.
FIG. 1 shows scenario 100 of prior-art interaction. During scenario 100, speaker 104 provides spoken command 110 to “Search for restaurants near Union Station” to mobile device 102. Mobile device 102 interprets spoken command 110 as a search query and utilizes a search engine with keywords 114 “Restaurants near Union Station.” FIG. 1 shows that, in response to the search query, the search engine returns textual results 116 for three restaurants: (1) Super-Duper Wurst, (2) Pizza 1357, and (3) Yogurt and Salad. Voice outputs for these voice interfaces typically generate flat or (nearly) monotone speech output. As shown in FIG. 1, mobile device 102 generates speech 118 by reading textual results 116 using monotone speech.